CO2 Emissions Still Climbing

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Global carbon dioxide levels have hit a record high despite reports of local improvements in air quality due to the coronavirus lockdown. During the pandemic, satellite data had shown reductions in nitrogen dioxide levels over urban areas in China, Europe and the US but overall, global emissions are climbing.



The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) released data last week showing that CO2 levels have risen steeply. According to the US agency the monthly average CO2 concentrations, recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, were 416.21 parts per million (ppm) this year compared to 413.33ppm in April 2019. It’s the highest concentration since records began in 1958. CO2 concentrations a decade ago were 393.18ppm.
Not only are CO2 concentrations increasing but they are also accelerating, according to the data. During the 1960s, the increase over one year was an average of 0.9ppm which has risen to an average 2.4ppm a year in the past decade.
Climate scientists indicated that the coronavirus pandemic could lead to a drop in emissions but that without structural change, they would be short-lived and have little impact on the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere that has taken place over decades.

NOAA says it is “confident” that the CO2 measurements “reflect the truth about our global atmosphere”.



Rob Jackson, head of the Global Carbon Project, explained that although greenhouse gas emissions dipped in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, they rebounded during economic recovery and increased 5.1%.



The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that while the pandemic had led to a reduction in air and road travel along with industrial activity since the beginning of the year, electricity use has not dropped. Nearly two-thirds of global electricity energy is made up from fossil fuels with coal being the main source.



https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-coronavirus-lockdown-carbon-dioxide-a9508791.html

A social revolution is still to come

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 The Socialist Party keeps promoting a revolution that no one else seems to be interested in having. And since we need many more to be in favour, all we can do is persist in our campaigns of socialist education and wait. It does seem strange to us that with inequality reaching extreme heights and the wealthy can no longer to hide away behind their mansions in gated communities that a revolution would be inevitable. Alas, no. The vast majority of the population still do not consider a revolution worth having even though the planet is in a state of an emergency with a pandemic and a climate crisis. The majority don’t seek to be free, they merely struggle to be better treated slaves. The ruling class has created a cultural belief system that claims that their interests are for the good of the people, but strangely it always result in making them richer and  more powerful.  The whole world is forced into total dependency upon their system. Ahh, well. But the Socialist Party remember it will be their revolution, not ours. So we wait and agitate.



Once it was coercion that kept people in line. Now it is manipulated minds. John Keracher, a Marxist from the 20s and 30s, called the mass media the “head-fixing industry”. 



 The elite divert our anger against their privileges by stoking fear against external “enemies”, another foreign power or immigrants from other lands. Even this pandemic is labelled the “invisible foe”, absolving the employing, owning class of any blame. They are not responsible for the spread of the pandemic, they tell us, and are similarly the victims, as their stock and share investments swell in price. They issue semi-plausible conspiracy theories to divert attention away from their own complicity and culpability.



We are living in strange times indeed.  This crises we face raises many questions about the type of society we live under and what our expectations are, or should be, about it. Capitalism is propelling people towards the ecological abyss and environmental activists have largely made peace with capitalism, advocating profitable techno-fixes rather than any change to the economic order. Capitalism is reducing our ability to survive on this planet. People are genuinely concerned about the approaching calamities civilisation is facing. The Socialist Party, too, feels afraid. But we are not frightened of the need for social change as a solution. People are tired of being told what to do by “leaders”. People are beginning to reject their top-down “solutions”. People want to be the decision-makers themselves, which means more than the periodic input of an election which is customary disregarded by the elected government. Working people can and must speak out in their own name. We cannot rely on those who claim to speak for us. There is an alternative. We can find new ways to come together and discuss new directions for our society and the economy.



A revolution of a real kind, one where our relationship are radically changed is the Socialist Party’s agenda. Change will come. When? We cannot predict or prophesise. But soon. Surely soon.



  In the middle of this pandemic and the threat of global warming we have learned to think and work cooperatively. People have come together in voluntary associations. We are not only curing ourselves of the COVID-19 virus but we are also in the process of curing ourselves of the cancer of capitalism. The Socialist Party may be a small voice but we are saying a radical change is required, not in the far-off future but right now if we want people to possess real choices over our lives. We patiently persevere with our case for socialism until fellow-workers listen and it is eventually heard. What happens next is vital for human survival. 



Gerrymandering the vote

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2018 referendum, approved by 62% of Missouri voters, put a non-partisan demographer in charge of drawing districts, limiting partisan influence on the process. It also makes partisan fairness one of the top criteria the mapmaker must follow. It would likely weaken Republican control of the legislature, according to an Associated Press analysis. Voters who embraced the changes sought to prevent excessive gerrymandering, a process of manipulating electoral maps that Republicans have used to gain advantages throughout the country this decade.



Now, Republicans are proposing a new ballot that would undo those protections. Their plan would eliminate the non-partisan demographer and return redistricting power to committees nominated by the political parties and selected by the governor. It makes partisan fairness the least important criteria to follow when drawing maps, instead prioritizing keeping communities compact. The proposal also makes it harder to get a gerrymandered map struck down in court. The measure has already passed the state senate, and is awaiting a vote in the full House. If approved by 15 May, voters across the state would then choose whether to support it later this year. It is likely the last chance Republicans, who control the state legislature, have to undo the referendum before the once-a-decade redistricting takes place in 2021.



If Republicans succeed, advocates worry it could serve as a model for weakening gerrymandering reform elsewhere. Voters in Michigan, Colorado and Utah all used ballot measures to pass gerrymandering reform in 2018. There is also deep concern the Republican proposal will open the door to redistricting in a way that will disadvantage minorities and non-citizens.


US districts must have roughly the same number of people in them, and states have long used the total population as the basis for drawing them. But the new proposal says the lines should be drawn on the basis of “one person, one vote”. It would allow Missouri Republicans to draw districts based only on those eligible to vote – US citizens aged 18 and over. It’s a standard Republicans have been pushing for, and one that would likely advantage white rural areas and hurt cities, where there are more likely to be non-citizens.
The language in the Republican proposal is “a little odd” and “disingenuous at best,” said Yurij Rudensky, redistricting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. Missouri, he said, has long based representation on the total population, not just those eligible to vote.
“This is another example of a change that sets the redistricting process up to fail and to make it a mess,” he said. “And to potentially set up for a discriminatory scheme that disadvantages communities of color and would cut out certain constituencies out of the political calculus.”

“The substance of what they’re trying to do has already been outrageous, and it’s incredible that they’re trying to move this attempt to overturn the will of the voters, when voters literally can’t participate in the process,” said Sean Soendker Nicholson, the campaign manager for Clean Missouri, the group behind the gerrymandering reform measure.



 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/11/missouri-republicans-gutting-gerrymandering-reform



Forward to a New Normal

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Capitalist relationships permeate the world. We cannot avoid them, we cannot run away from them. We cannot self-isolate from them. Capitalism turning everything possible into commodities, including people and nature. The profit motive directly the demonic hidden hand of the market threatens to degrade our planet. The Earth is sick and capitalism is to blame. People pay the price with lives. The current COVID-19 pandemic the world is facing now is without any precedent and its full implication is yet to be understood. It is not clear what society in the future will look like, whether the system’s indifference to the death of the weak and vulnerable will continue. 
Can ther be a return to “normal” when what was normal for many was never ever a good life. Sure there are grand rhetoric pronouncements from politicians that the world is united against the pandemic and the race to discover the vaccine to defeat this virus is not a competition but a collaboration between countries. Yet for the pharmaceutical industry there is a lucrative prize for the first at the finishing line. There is little cooperation or sharing between the rival corporations. The lawyers specialised in global patents and intellectual property have not been furloughed.
Socialists opt for hoperather than succumb to cynical pessimism fed by dystopian scenarios. capitalism expresses itself with its ceaseless destructive expansion, its endless profit and capital accumulation which blights our planet like a cancer. Socialists do not let this drop us into a state of despair and despondency. Socialists have pinpointed the problem – capitalism. We propose fixing what capitalism has created, providing the necessities of life for everyone and not just the few.



Changing Agriculture

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“If during the next sixty to seventy years the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s US corn grower, the ten billion will need only half of today’s cropland while they eat today’s American calories,” concluded agronomist Paul Waggoner in his seminal 1996 article, “How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?“



In their 2013 article, “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing,” Waggoner and Rockefeller University researchers Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick citing current global trends in yield increases and fertilizer deployment calculated if biofuel production could be reined in, that as much as 400 million hectares (1.5 million square miles) of current cropland could be returned to nature by 2060. That’s about 25 percent of the land currently devoted to growing crops. “Now we are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for nature,” the authors concluded.
Christian Folberth and his colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria reinforces the findings from these earlier reports.



In their article, “The global cropland-sparing potential of high-yield farming,” the researchers calculate a scenario that closes current global yield gaps, bringing the crop yields of farmers in poorer countries up to those in richer countries. Achieving that goal “would allow reduction of the cropland area required to maintain present production volumes by nearly 50% of its current extent.” That would mean that about 576 million hectares (2.2 million square miles) could be restored to nature.



The researchers also sketch out an alternative high crop yield scenario that specifically aims to protect and expand the habitats of threatened species. In that case, cropland use would still shrink by almost 40 percent.
Keep in mind that these scenarios are conservatively reckoning what would happen to global land use assuming that essentially all of the world’s farmers adopt modern high yield agriculture. They do not take into account technological improvements in farming over the coming decades.



In addition, possible shifts in consumption toward alternative protein sources such as plant-based “meats” or cultured meats are not considered. Since about 36 percent of cropland is used to produce animal feed and the vast majority of agricultural land is pasture, such changes in consumer tastes could result in hundreds of millions more hectares of land being spared for nature by the middle of this century.

https://reason.com/2020/04/17/its-possible-to-cut-cropland-use-in-half-and-produce-the-same-amount-of-food-says-new-study/?itm_source=parsely-api

All in it Together?

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As the COVID-19 crisis intensifies, tens of millions of American families are falling into hunger. For single mothers with children under the age of 12, an astonishing 40 percent are now reporting that they are running out of food without the financial ability to purchase more.  Adults are missing meals to keep children fed. But many children are, nevertheless, going hungry. 
Food banks now routinely report miles-long lines of cars, with drivers waiting for hours to receive bags of produce to tide their families over. The charity Feeding America estimates that the number of food-insecure Americans who will access its food bank network will increase from 37 million at the start of the pandemic to upwards of 54 million over a six-month period. Meanwhile, private donations to food banks are drying up, and the number of Americans volunteering in their local food banks is also declining — a not unsurprising situation given many volunteers are themselves elderly and medically vulnerable.
At the same time, huge amounts of farm produce are going to waste: Farmers are literally destroying crops, meat and dairy supplies that they have no buyers for because schools, restaurants, hotels and other big commercial purchasers are no longer buying produce.

Millions of workers – especially low-wage retail, food service, hospitality, and care workers – have faced the terrible choice daily between going to work and risking their health, or staying home and risking their paychecks. As tens of millions have lost their jobs over the past two months, billionaire wealth soared by a whopping $282 billion between March 18 and April 10, according to a new study from the Institute for Policy Studies. Billionaires have been escaping to their second (or third, or fourth) homes to ride it out in luxury – all while they position themselves to further profit off of this crisis.  Rather than retreating behind the gates of private estates, some of the ultra-wealthy have taken to the high seas to weather the crisis on luxury yachts far away from the misery on the mainland.



 As many as 43 million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance due to the pandemic, according to a new report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the Urban Institute. The pandemic “exposes a lot of the inadequacies in our system,” RWJF senior policy analyst Katherine Hempstead told The Guardian, adding that healthcare is “tied to employment for no real reason.”

Last month, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that 12.7 million people had already lost their employer-based health insurance. 



 COVID-19 pandemic is not the “great equalizer” that some predicted.

The real Lord of the Flies

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William Golding’s Lord of the Flies depicts a cynical image of humanity but socialists from all over the world have held a more hopeful view of mankind. 


The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. There were six of us who had been castaways on ‘Ata an uninhabited island near Tonga for 15 months. The boys were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at the strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand. They had decided to steal a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. The boys had been given up for dead and funerals held for them.


The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass. They drifted for eight days without food or water. The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening. On the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. 


By the tie they were rescued the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination. While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out. The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. 


Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.


Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”


They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).
They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg.


While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read.



https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

Is world socialism a pipe dream?

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 Will out of this calamity come a better world? The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown us something that most of us have known for a long time, there is something wrong with our system. Yet it’s almost like we all have  Stockholm Syndrome, defending a society that lack compassion and that put us all at risk. But we have learned to stand in solidarity with those who are currently deliver essential services— health workers, sanitation workers, people working in shops.



The Socialist Party hope that somehow this global health calamity might lead to a better world. More importantly, after all the misery, we need and must work for a better world. The pandemic has made clear the oneness of the peoples of the world. Seen from space, the Earth has no borders. The spread of the coronavirus is showing us that what we share is much more powerful than what keeps us apart. All people are inescapably interconnected, and the more we can come together to solve our problems, the better off we will all be. One of the side effects of COVID-19 is feeling more compassion for others. Humanity can work together to prevail over this pandemic and discover the folly of battling with each other. The coronavirus demonstrates the mutual global dependencies of the world’s peoples. Its demanding that  resources be redirected for the service of health and peaceful life. The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people. But governments continue to waste the opportunities to create by fueling the destructive arms race. 



We should recognise the value of collective social relationships. We’re brothers and sisters must think and act cooperatively like one family. While the global pandemic has put everyone at risk, the most vulnerable are the elderly, the ill, the unhealthy, the economically distressed, the inadequately housed and the homeless, and the minorities. But none of us is safe. Wealth and power can only confer a certain level of protection. We can now consider the type of society we wish to emerge post-pandemic. Governments favour a return to the status quo, the restoration of the old order that existed for the benefit of a tiny minority. Socialists see the potential for transformations’ that would lead to greater equality and better well-being for the majority. It is our chance to do things differently. Social change is possible. A different world, a different economy can be the future.



We must become one world or prepare ourselves for the end of our civilisation. This virus  threat can be overcome through genuine cooperation and solidarity among all the people of the world. Why not work cooperatively to save humanity from massive global death and economic collapse rather than waging wars and slaughtering one another. The same intensity with which mankind has practiced war through the ages must now be applied to building a peaceful and prosperous planet. We can create a new and better world—but we must fully commit ourselves to it and work for it. We need a mighty movement to transform the World. Can we build a movement of movements?



While our attention is fixed upon the pandemic, the planet continues to warm – polar ice-caps melts, glaciers disappear, forest fires and droughte appear,  seas rise, plant and animal species disappear and people continue to be displaced. Socialists hold a vision of a saner, healthier, and a cooler world.



Sea-levels to rise higher than projected

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Oceans rising faster than previously thought, according to survey of 100 specialists. Sea-level rise could exceed 1 metre by the end of the century unless global emissions are reduced and could reach as high as 5 metres by 2300.



“A global sea-level rise by several metres would be detrimental for many coastal cities such as Miami, New York, Alexandria, Venice, Bangkok, just to name a few well-known examples. Some may have to be abandoned altogether as they cannot be defended,” said co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “Like in the Covid pandemic, timing is critical to prevent devastation. If you wait until you already have a serious problem, then it is too late. Unlike with corona, sea-level rise cannot be stopped for many centuries or even millennia once ice sheets have been destabilised past their tipping points,” Rahmstorf said.



In the worst-case scenario – with rising emissions and global heating of 4.5C above pre-industrial levels – the study estimates the surface of the world’s oceans in 2100 will be between 0.6 and 1.3 metres higher than today, which would potentially engulf areas home to hundreds of millions of people.  If humanity succeeds in cutting carbon dioxide and holding the increase in temperature to 2C, the rise would be a more manageable 0.5 metre.



The figures for both are more pessimistic than those outlined by the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), which predicts the worst possibility is a 1.1-metre rise by 2100.  The new survey – published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science – aggregates the views of 106 specialists, who were chosen because they have published at least six peer-reviewed papers on the subject in major academic journals. As a result, the predictions are more representative of a range of views in the field.



The higher estimates highlight growing concern about the world’s two biggest ice sheets, in Antarctica and Greenland. Satellite data and on-the-ground measurements show these regions are melting faster than most computer models predicted. Many of the scientists said there was now greater understanding of the risks posed by marine ice-cliff instability, which can lead to the collapse of ice shelves.



The study was led by scientists at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore with support from seven research institutions across the world, including Durham University in the UK, Tufts University in the US and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“Although emissions are reducing this year, this does not mean the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere will reverse – it will just be slightly slower” the Met Office’s chief CO2 forecaster, Richard Betts, said in a blogpost. “An analogy is filling a bath from a tap – it’s like we are turning down the tap, but because we are not turning off the tap completely, the water level is still rising.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/08/sea-levels-could-rise-more-than-a-metre-by-2100-experts-say

Remembering Kent State

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May 4, 2020 is the 50th anniversary of the massacre at Kent State University when the Ohio National Guard opened fire upon peaceful protesters against America’s military attacks upon Cambodia. Four students dead, nine wounded, one paralyzed for life.



 Miss Allison Krause, 19, Pittsburgh, Pa.; Miss Sandy Lee Scheuer, 20, Youngstown, Ohio; Jeffrey G. Miller, 20, Plainview, N.Y., and William K. Schroeder, 19, Lorain, Ohio.



The invasion of Cambodia and killings at Kent sparked an unprecedented national student strike. Over 400 campuses were shut down and occupied by the students. Millions of people joined street demonstrations demanding an end to the war. 


Over 58,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam. Over 300,000 were wounded. Over 2,000,000 Vietnamese, Laotians and Kampucheans died under 15,500,000 tons of bombs and millions of gallons of defoliants that devastated an entire part of the planet.

Ten days later, Mississippi state police opened fired into a dormitory at protesting students at Jackson State University that left two dead and many wounded.

On May 11, 1970, in Augusta, Georgia the burned and tortured body of an incarcerated 16-year old black youth was dumped by his jailers at a local hospital. The resulting protest left six African-American men dead.



Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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